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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Industrial relations & safety > Industrial relations > General
The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers'
(UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the
UFW has lent its rallying cry to a presidential campaign and been
the subject of no less than nine books, two documentaries, and one
motion picture. Yet the full story of the women, men, and children
who powered this social movement has not yet been told Based on
more than 250 hours of original oral history interviews conducted
with Coachella Valley residents who participated in the UFW and
Chicano Movement, Filipino farm workers, bracero workers, and UFW
volunteers throughout the United States, this stirring history
spans from the 1960s and 1970s through the union's decline in the
early 1980s. Christian O. Paiz refocuses attention on the struggle
inherent in organizing a particularly vulnerable labor force,
especially during a period that saw the hollowing out of virtually
all of the country's most powerful labor unions. He emphasizes that
telling this history requires us to wrestle with the radical
contingency of rank-and-file agency-an agency that often overflowed
the boundaries of individual intentions. By drawing on the voices
of ordinary farmworkers and volunteers, Paiz reveals that the
sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic story of the UFW is less about
individual leaders and more the result of a collision between the
larger anti-union currents of the era and the aspirations of the
rank-and-file.
The past decades have borne witness to the United Farm Workers'
(UFW) tenacious hold on the country's imagination. Since 2008, the
UFW has lent its rallying cry to a presidential campaign and been
the subject of no less than nine books, two documentaries, and one
motion picture. Yet the full story of the women, men, and children
who powered this social movement has not yet been told Based on
more than 250 hours of original oral history interviews conducted
with Coachella Valley residents who participated in the UFW and
Chicano Movement, Filipino farm workers, bracero workers, and UFW
volunteers throughout the United States, this stirring history
spans from the 1960s and 1970s through the union's decline in the
early 1980s. Christian O. Paiz refocuses attention on the struggle
inherent in organizing a particularly vulnerable labor force,
especially during a period that saw the hollowing out of virtually
all of the country's most powerful labor unions. He emphasizes that
telling this history requires us to wrestle with the radical
contingency of rank-and-file agency-an agency that often overflowed
the boundaries of individual intentions. By drawing on the voices
of ordinary farmworkers and volunteers, Paiz reveals that the
sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic story of the UFW is less about
individual leaders and more the result of a collision between the
larger anti-union currents of the era and the aspirations of the
rank-and-file.
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to
control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out
of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and
their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive
techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns,
incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less
overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring
speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. This
book draws together the groups engaged in this kind of violence,
reimagining the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order
Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances as
employers' associations driven by unambiguous economic and
managerial interests. Though usually discussed separately, all of
these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class
challengers-former slaves, rustlers, homesteaders of modest means,
populists, political radicals, and striking workers-as menacing
villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. And
perhaps most notably, spokespersons for these respective
organizations justified their actions by insisting that they were
committed to upholding "law and order." Ultimately, this book
suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can
be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror
against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines
conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.
In this groundbreaking volume, Juan Jose Baldrich traces the deep
changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers
and their export markets from the Spanish colonization of the
island to the present. Based on more than twenty years of research
in the United States and Puerto Rico, the book sheds light on the
important history of tobacco in Puerto Rico while highlighting the
people and practices that have indelibly shaped Puerto Rico and its
culture. Smoker beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco
is a work of recovery that examines tobacco's transitions from
medicinal use to rolls fit for chewing and pipe smoking, followed
by the appropriation of the Cuban paradigm for cigars and
cigarettes, and, finally, to the US models after the 1898 invasion.
This pioneering volume also offers the only history of the US
tobacco monopoly in local agriculture and manufacture from its
beginning in 1899 to the bankruptcy of its last successor company
forty years later. Baldrich's extensive research documents the
organization of the cigar and cigarette manufacturing sectors and
the resulting development of trade unions and socialist ideals.
This multidisciplinary investigation gives due attention to the
modifications that farmers made to tobacco planting and harvesting
techniques in fine-tuning plants to the expected aromas and tastes
of the manufactured commodities. In addition, Baldrich pays
considerable attention to gender relations in the labor process,
not only in the manufacturing sector but also in tobacco
agriculture. The book also provides the only narrative of the rise
and maturity of the Hermanos Cheos, a powerful apocalyptical
movement that began and spread in the tobacco growing regions.
Ultimately, this encompassing volume fills a major gap in the
histories of tobacco-producing islands in the Caribbean.
During global capitalism's long ascent from 1600-1850, workers of
all kinds-slaves, indentured servants, convicts, domestic workers,
soldiers, and sailors-repeatedly ran away from their masters and
bosses, with profound effects. A Global History of Runaways, edited
by Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum,
compares and connects runaways in the British, Danish, Dutch,
French, Mughal, Portuguese, and American empires. Together these
essays show how capitalism required vast numbers of mobile workers
who would build the foundations of a new economic order. At the
same time, these laborers challenged that order-from the
undermining of Danish colonization in the seventeenth century to
the igniting of civil war in the United States in the nineteenth.
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country,
the American Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19
infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants-and
Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not
simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered.
Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing
Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born
residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
In Meatpacking America, she digs deep below the stereotype and
reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global
hub of migration and food production-and also, it turns out, of
religion. Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims
share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On
the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of
worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived
Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious
faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories
expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend
uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases.
Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language
of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them
would have ever expected.
Delving beneath Southern CaliforniaOCOs popular image as a sunny
frontier of leisure and ease, this book tells the dynamic story of
the life and labor of Los AngelesOCOs large working class. In a
sweeping narrative that takes into account more than a century of
labor history, John H. M. Laslett acknowledges the advantages
Southern CaliforniaOCOs climate, open spaces, and bucolic character
offered to generations of newcomers. At the same time, he
demonstrates thatOCoin terms of wages, hours, and conditions of
workOCoL.A. differed very little from AmericaOCOs other industrial
cities. Both fast-paced and sophisticated, "Sunshine Was Never
Enough "shows how labor in all its guisesOCoblue and white collar,
industrial, agricultural, and high techOCoshaped the neighborhoods,
economic policies, racial attitudes, and class perceptions of the
City of Angels.Laslett explains how, until the 1930s, many of
L.A.OCOs workers were under the thumb of the Merchants and
Manufacturers Association. This conservative organization kept
wages low, suppressed trade unions, and made L.A. into the open
shop capital of America. By contrast now, at a time when the
AFL-CIO is at its lowest ebbOCoa young generation of Mexican and
African American organizers has infused the L.A. movement with
renewed strength. These stories of the men and women who pumped
oil, loaded ships in San Pedro harbor, built movie sets, assembled
aircraft, and in more recent times cleaned hotels and washed cars
is a little-known but vital part of Los Angeles history."
Modern Cronies traces how various industrialists, thrown together
by the effects of the southern gold rush, shaped the development of
the southeastern United States. Existing historical scholarship
treats the gold rush as a self-contained blip that-aside from the
horrors of Cherokee Removal (admittedly no small thing) and a
supply of miners to California in 1849-had no other widespread
effects. In fact, the southern gold rush was a significant force in
regional and national history. The pressure brought by the gold
rush for Cherokee Removal opened the path of the Western &
Atlantic Railroad, the catalyst for the development of both Atlanta
and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Iron makers, attracted by the gold
rush, built the most elaborate iron-making operations in the Deep
South near this railroad, in Georgia's Etowah Valley; some of these
iron makers became the industrial talent in the fledgling
postbellum city of Birmingham, Alabama. This book explicates the
networks of associations and interconnections across these varied
industries in a way that newly interprets the development of the
southeastern United States. Modern Cronies also reconsiders the
meaning of Joseph E. Brown, Georgia's influential Civil War
governor, political heavyweight, and wealthy industrialist. Brown
was nurtured in the Etowah Valley by people who celebrated mining,
industrialization, banking, land speculation, and railroading as a
path to a prosperous future. Kenneth H. Wheeler explains Brown's
familial, religious, and social ties to these people; clarifies the
origins of Brown's interest in convict labor; and illustrates how
he used knowledge and connections acquired in the gold rush to
enrich himself. After the Civil War Brown, aided by his sons,
dominated and modeled a vigorous crony capitalism with far-reaching
implications.
While the concept of teleworking has existed for many years, the
COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered the operations of businesses
and industries around the world. Through these shifts, there have
been many challenges of adapting employees, business operations,
productivity levels, technology, and more to meet this increased
demand in teleworking. Through these challenges, not only were
businesses forced to adapt, but a new wave of telework and its
approach have been fostered. Analyzing Telework, Trustworthiness,
and Performance Using Leader-Member Exchange: COVID-19 Perspective
focuses on evaluating the response to the pandemic and how to
continually improve teleworking and organizations in their
utilization of remote work. This book provides multifaceted
perspectives focused on all parties involved in these issues, from
employees to CEOs. Covering topics such as employee risk, telework
resistance, and performance, this book is an essential resource for
managers, CEOs, business leaders, students of higher education,
professors, researchers, and academicians.
This book examines the Brazilian political process in the period of
2003-2020: the governments led by the Workers' Party and their
reformist policies, the deep political crisis that led to the
impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the rise of Bolsonaro
neofascism. The author maintains that the Party and ideological
conflicts present in the Brazilian politics are linked to the class
distributive conflicts present in the Brazilian society. Defeated
for the fourth consecutive time in the presidential election, the
political parties representing the international capital and
segments of the bourgeoisie and of the middle class, abandoned the
rules of the democratic game to end the Workers' Party government
cycle. They paved the way for the rise of neofascism.
With the current upsurge of Industry 4.0, the way manufacturers
assemble their products to sell in a competitive market has
changed, guided by the SMART strategy. Only the most adaptable and
suitable firms will be able to survive in this new business and
economic world, and in this sense, the combination of (formal and
informal) formation and working experience exerted by senior
entrepreneurs will generate competitive advantages in the firms
they work. Senior Entrepreneurship and Aging in Modern Business is
an essential reference source that discusses senior
entrepreneurship, its benefits to companies due to its combination
of practical experience and training, and the impact technology has
on it. Featuring research on topics such as human capital, value
creation, and organizational success, this book is ideally designed
for entrepreneurs, executives, managers, policymakers,
professionals, researchers, business administrators, academicians,
and students.
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